Thursday, July 01, 2010

MSM: Wrong Again

Is there a more annoying genre of journalism than the one where people who've never had a proper job berate everyone else for being distracted by trivia, instead of embracing their particular hobby horse?

I think of them as the 'how can you eat lunch while there's polar bears dying in Africa?' stories. Latest example: here.

The thing is Glover's article doesn't even make sense on its own terms - and not just because the landlord sounds kind of cool. Glover implies that the whole footy thing is just a distraction from the real issues. Really? Consider the Fabio Capello story.

Here was a guy who was wafted into the hot seat on a cloud of media hype. Anyone who pointed out that he lacked relevant experience, never having managed in England or at international level, was labelled a luddite Little Englander. No, siree, Jack: this was a new era, and if Fabulous Fabio needed to stuff the payroll with cronies and all but declare himself emperor, well, that was the price of progress.

Hey, it worked for a while, but even then, some morons were heard to suggest that doing the double over Andorra wasn't quite the achievement the MSM portrayed it as and maybe Capello's achievements merely reflected England returning to their natural level after being dragged down by the borderline lunacy of his predecessor. Still, if you listened to the MSM, times they were a-changing, and if Capello seemed more comfortable tearing into the traditional values of English football than explaining what he wanted to replace them with, well, that just proved how sophisticated he was (and never mind that his tactics seemed mightily to resemble those discarded by Continental teams a generation ago).

Nemesis arrived in South Africa. It turned out that the MSM's Designated Messiah was an autocratic bully totalling lacking in any ability to lead those whose skills he needed for success, while his supposedly superior intellect didn't stretch to actually coming up with any answers for England's problems.

So, in summary then, absolutely no resonance with anything or anyone else in the country. Our 'watchdog' media backing a total chump is just a one-off and we can safely ignore any further consideration of Mr Fabio Camerello.

2 comments:

Squander Two said...

There's a poll on that page: "Should Fabio Capello be sacked?"

It only has two answers, though: "Yes" and "No". My answer would be "Who?"

JuliaM said...

Heh!